Environmental Thoughts - Rochester, NY | Connecting the dots between the predictions of Climate Change from many studies and reports to Rochester, NY's environment.

Monday, May 30, 2016

Using the past to guide us through Climate Change

Given
the planetary impact of dangerously quick climate temperatures rising around
the world due to human machinations, I suspect there are precious few examples
in the past to guide us forward. We are in trouble in a way we never have been
before. Civilizations have come and gone over the span of human existence but
the entire species and all other species on the planet haven’t before been
placed in jeopardy by humanity’s collective attitudes towards our life support
system. (Of course, we are always under the threat of mass annihilation by
nuclear proliferation but that crisis is not due to the behavior of
everyone—just some bad players and some crazy national policies.) Furthermore,
we will have to address all our major existential problems—nuclear proliferation,
Climate Change, pollution, overpopulation, overconsumption, the loss of
biodiversity and much more—at the same time. This is why Climate Change is the
mother of all problems.

Toffler’s
1970 book Future Shock talked about
modernization moving so quickly that it will be increasingly more difficult to
use the past as a guide for the future. This is certainly true with Climate
Change. Naturally, we have science as a guide as to what is going on. But
science and climatologists’ rushing to fill our knowledge gaps about Climate
Change won’t teach us how seven billion people will adjust to the “inconvenience”
of a warming planet, where the catastrophic consequences are far more likely to
impact those who didn’t cause this crisis than those who did. Also, fairness must
be baked into addressing Climate Change, or else social unrest will compound
this crisis by multitudes of factors.

We
do have examples in history of visionaries who were able to get the measure of
the critical issues of their times and arriving at insights that we, in their
future, find enlightened and forever attitude altering. These special
individuals knew then what we know now. Examples include Samuel Adams and the
idea that a colony of a great power should and could break free when their
unfair treatment becomes intolerable. Jefferson’s notion that “all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights” (though he himself didn’t practiced what he preached.). Stanton’s and Anthony’s
position that women must have the right to vote. Alexander Von Humboldt’s vision
that science should develop and flourish beyond national boundaries and
ideologies. And a lot more individuals throughout our history who saw ahead of their
contemporaries about what people could become by turning the great ship of
humanity towards those ends.

One
such visionary whose views might be instructive in our current Climate Change crisis
is William Lloyd Garrison’s position on slavery in the United States.

Garrison,
publisher of The Liberator, an (the) abolitionist newspaper started in
1831, compelled race equality into the US Constitution. In the 1830's most
abolitionists, politicians, newspapers, and just about everyone North and South
believed that slavery should and would end eventually. But for even moral heroes
like Lincoln that meant holding to the Constitution, where slavery was
legalized, and Colonization by sending freed slaves to another place (Liberia),
and allowing time to take its course. Garrison changed everything as he upheld
immediacy, no Colonization, and total equality. No if’s, and’s, or but’s.

What
we think of as abolitionism today is the result of Garrison’s life work.

"It comes as a surprise to realize
that of all the antebellum political conceptions about slavery that contended
for supremacy--states' rights, three-fifths clause, Missouri Compromise,
toleration but nonextension, popular sovereignty--it was Garrison's program of
immediate emancipation through the repudiation of the proslavery constitutional
compromises and a union dissolved and reconstructed that prevailed." (Page
XV, All On Fire)

Emphatic
on abolishing slavery, Garrison succeeded in convincing just enough groups and
key individuals that anything less that immediate and total equality,
regardless of the Constitution, was the only morally acceptable solution to
slavery. Almost everyone but Fredrick Douglas thought Garrison was an
intolerant ideologue bent on destroying the union.

Sure,
most antebellum folks thought Garrison incapable of compromise and reason—though
now we see that he was quite reasonable. So too will be those who hold to the
proposition that Climate Change must be addressed now before it gets worse.
There are innumerable solutions being entertained right now that attempt to
address Climate Change but so far they are not equal to the task. Just buying
an electric car, or creating a carbon tax, or shifting to organics, or other
single actions won’t save the planet. Nothing but the immediate relief from
manmade greenhouse gas emissions will save our life support system. There are no
concessions to physics possible, no slow and gradual options for keeping fossil
fuel energy use alive, and no transporting this problem to the future. We are
nearing the danger zone on Climate Change, a point where natural and built
environments break down from overheating and social unrest.

Many
now are realizing that Climate Change is an existential problem but are still
holding that the solution must come gradually so as not to disrupt the
'harmony' of our fossil-fuel driven existence or threaten our present economy.

Garrison
was able to see the clear and unambiguous nature of slavery. It was evil. That the
numerous attempts to make chattel slavery a morally justified institution, thereby
avoiding the obvious trajectory, were only making it more likely for all to end
in a great conflagration. True, ending slavery with the Civil War and the
Thirteenth Amendment did not end the brutality against folks with dark skin and
yes, Reconstruction was a disaster; nevertheless, slave auctions and the selling
of people in the US is no more.

Even
more compelling than the moral arguments against slavery are the hard
scientific realities behind Climate Change. Climate Change is the moral problem
of our day. But it is not a moral problem in the way slavery was. Climate
Change is beyond morality in the sense that while it is certainly a moral
issue, it is our behavior, however motivated, that will matter. Though terrible
and evil, slavery was not threatening the existence of every living being on
this planet. Garrison’s goal was to prove to the public that slavery was evil
and that humanity must change their attitudes immediately. Garrison struggled
to change humanity by appealing to everyone’s sense of Christian morality.
Garrison didn’t want to change Christianity to change everyone; he wanted
everyone to actually practice Christianity.

With
Climate Change, humanity must change their behavior so that our actions render
our environment sustainable. If appealing to humanity’s sense of morality will
do the trick, then we should do that. But it alone probably won’t on a scale
and time that will matter. If morality had that power, it would have already
worked. It’s not working; world temperatures and concentrations of greenhouse
gases are going up, not down. Climate Change isn’t just morally wrong, it will
be the end of us if we don’t become another kind of being—a non-selfish being
willing to share the planet with others. Dramatic actions along with a keen
sense of moral outrage will probably have to occur before the kind of change
needed will happen. Actions like Break Free From
Fossil Fuels
are an indication, like abolitionism, that some are willing to stand up against
the social inertial that is plummeting us into an unsustainable future.

The
value of learning about Garrison and other visionaries is that there are past
examples of how someone understood the core problem of their age and became the
vehicle of change. Garrison understood that the only solution to ending slavery
was changing the public’s attitudes about slavery. Not ballot box morality
(continually electing pro-slavery politicians to avert war sure didn’t work),
not making concession with the other side, not continuing business as usual, and
not thinking some states could have slavery and some could not; none of these provided
the solution. Was Garrison right about slavery? Yes, and the Thirteenth Amendment
proved him right.

Garrison
can help teach us to understand the core problem of our age: that our
environment must above all be healthy or no one survives. No human contrivance
can work quickly enough to solve this problem of Climate Change for it is we
who must change.

The
difference between those who would continue slavery in the yesteryears and
those in our day who procrastinate on Climate Change is that the former would
burn in Hell and the latter will burn right here on Earth, along with everyone
else.

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